It's the bane of many San Franciscans' existence: rushing back to a parked car to find a ticket on the windshield because you only put 12 quarters in the meter to go grab a cup of coffee (which costs less than the parking fee, at least downtown) and you should have plunked down 13.

Mayor Ed Lee would feel your pain - except he can go grab his cup of coffee or pick up his dry cleaning or eat a burrito without worrying about such trifling issues as where to park his car or whether he'll get ticketed.

As we told you last month, his official mayoral Chevrolet Volt was twice photographed stopped illegally. Once, it was parked in a bus stop in Glen Park while he and his security detail were inside La Corneta Taqueria, forcing Muni passengers to disembark in the middle of busy Diamond Street. Later, the car was photographed blocking a crosswalk in the Outer Sunset near Devil's Teeth Baking Co.

The city-issued Volt, driven by police officers on the mayor's security detail, was not ticketed in either instance, though the driver of the car in the bus-blocking incident was scolded. "No more burritos for you!" we imagine his supervisor snapping.

At the time, the mayor's spokeswoman, Christine Falvey, said, "The mayor is not driving the car. The mayor is not parking the car. ... There are protocols in place, and the mayor expects them to be followed."

Now, it seems the Volt is up to more misbehavior than we knew. S.F. Weekly reported that the car has been ticketed six times since Lee took office, five times for parking during street sweeping hours and once for parking in a tow-away zone. The tickets were dismissed at the request of the San Francisco Police Department, and nobody paid a penny.

After we tweeted a link to the Weekly's story, Police Chief Greg Suhrphoned to stress that the Police Department never takes care of the mayor's personal tickets - and that mayor is never the one driving the Volt.

"If you get a ticket on a city car while you're doing city duties, you can do a petition to your supervisor and request a dismissal based on the circumstances," Suhr said, "There's actually a form that says what you were doing when you got the ticket."

Of course if the mayor's car is parked for official duties, that's one thing. But Glen Park sure does seem to be a hotbed for his tickets. One came outside Glen Park Cleaners and two outside Bello Coffee & Tea, both in the mayor's neighborhood. (And mine, though strangely I've never seen him there. I'll look for the illegally parked Volt next time.)

So is it OK to park illegally if the mayor wants a cup of coffee or has to pick up his dry cleaning?

"You can drop him off, and then your partner should go with him to make sure he's safe and you should find parking," Suhr said of his officers on Lee's security detail. "My other concern is I hope they're not picking up their own dry cleaning."

Falvey stressed that it's not clear whether the mayor was even in the car when the tickets were handed out and that his security detail was recently retrained on parking protocol. She said Lee would rather drive himself around in his personal 2000 Toyota Camry, but he's not going to second guess the police chief's decision to assign him an official car and a security detail to escort him.

"The mayor is a regular guy, but he doesn't have a regular job," she said. "He needs to rely on the SFPD to get him around the city."

And into his local coffee shop.

So we know the mayor likes burritos, baked goods and coffee, but how does he feel about soda?

His board liaison lobbied members of the Board of Supervisors to keep the soda tax measure off the November ballot, saying it would be a distraction on a lengthy ballot with more important issues to focus on.

He came up short, and a two-cents-an-ounce tax on sugary drinks squeaked through the board and will indeed come before voters. It needs two-thirds of the vote to pass because it directs money to a specific purpose: programs that benefit children's nutrition and physical education.

So will Lee side with the majority of the board, the school board, a host of parent-teacher associations, the teachers union, several medical groups and local food banks, who all support the measure? Or will he side with the American Beverage Association and some businesses that sell sodas?

It might seem like an obvious choice, but it turns out Lee is going to stay out of the soda fight.

"It's not something he's focused on," Falvey said, noting he's choosing to spend his time working for the minimum wage measure, transportation bond and renewal of the children's fund. "It's just not something that's being debated and discussed - we're just not doing that."

So by refusing to endorse the measure, is he implicitly siding with Coke and Pepsi?

"I hope it wouldn't be construed that way," Falvey said.

Corey Cook, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, said the mayor hasn't had much influence on voters when it comes to ballot measures in the past and the fate of the soda tax won't hinge on Lee.

"It's an issue people have an opinion on right away - they aren't going to look to the mayor for an idea on how to vote on it," he said, adding that soda tax backers could hold it against the mayor when he runs for re-election next year.

Seems to have shades of Proposition B, the successful June ballot measure giving voters their say on future waterfront projects that break the zoned height limit. Lee privately hated the idea, but knew it would likely win - and thus stayed out of it. We hear he doesn't think the soda tax will pass either and doesn't want to be on the losing side.

Smart politics? Maybe. But isn't this the guy who vows he's not a politician?

Quote of the week

"It's an act of desperation, not investigation." Tony Serra, attorney for Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow, saying new criminal charges against his client are merely a tactic to win conviction